Jaamil Olawale Kosoko and Kate Watson-Wallace – co-directors of the interdisciplinary company anonymous bodies that straddles Philadelphia and Brooklyn – bring their performance experiments to JACK in a shared bill.

Kosoko will present an excerpt from The Jigaboo King, a performance installation that continues his investigation into the complexities of identity and masculinity and that is derived from his 2015 work #negrophobia. Contained in a single square of light and using a mash up of horror-film soundtracks, negro spirituals, and interview clips, this work examines the residual affects and parafictional constructs of whiteness as a code of supremacy within the contemporary American project. This work features musical accompaniment and sound design by Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste. The piece is made possible by the 2016 boo-koo residency at Gibney Dance Center.

In Watson-Wallace’s performance installation, she is joined by performers Jasmine Hearn and Ann-Marie Gover inside a large pile of fur – a container for conjuring trauma-ghosts, playing dress up/down, confessionals, boredom, and future-play. Featuring live musical accompaniment and sound design by Xenia Rubinos (ANTI Records), the installation uses strategies of pleasure, the erotic, ritual, and ecstatic experience to meditate on loss, desire and labor.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

anonymous bodies is an interdisciplinary performance company co-directed by Kate Watson-Wallace and Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, based in Brooklyn and Philadelphia. As a collective, the co-directors create work independently and collaboratively, creating an array of art projects, that range from solo performances in gallery settings, to larger performance installations, as well as curatorial projects. It is a project-based company that collaborates with a diverse group of artists, and draws upon the traditions of visual art, post-modern dance, site-specific study, conceptual and performance art, audience participation and public spectacle. The company has shown work at American Realness, Art Basel, Central Park Summerstage, Dance Theater Workshop, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Fringe Arts, Kelly Strayhorn Theater, The Yard, Velocity Dance Center, Dance Place, Moore College of Art & Design, Danspace Project, Movement Research, The Bushwick Starr and Gibney Dance Center, among others. Recent guest lecturer/residencies include: Princeton University, UCLA, Massachusetts College of Art & Design, University of Texas at Austin, University of the Arts, and Spelman College. www.anonymousbodies.org

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko is a Nigerian American independent performance and humanities curator, cultural strategist, poet, and artist currently based between Brooklyn, NY and Philadelphia, PA. He is an inaugural APAP Leadership Fellow, a Co-Curator of the 2015 Movement Research Spring Festival and the 2015 Dancing While Black performance series at BAAD in the Bronx; a 2014 American Express Leadership Academy alum, a contributing correspondent for Critical Correspondence (NYC); a 2012 Live Arts Brewery Fellow as a part of the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival; a 2011 Fellow as a part of the DeVos Institute of Art Management at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; and an inaugural graduate of the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (ICPP) at Wesleyan University. Kosoko is a Founding Advisory Board Member of the Coalition for Diasporan Scholars Moving and was most recently elected to the Executive Committee on the Board of Trustees at Dance/USA. Kosoko’s work in live performance has received support from The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, The Philadelphia Cultural Management Initiative, The Joyce Theater Foundation, and The Philadelphia Cultural Fund. Current curatorial appointments include projects with 651 Arts, The Watermill Center, Movement Research, and The Bushwick Starr in New York City among others. His most recent performance project, #negrophobia, premiered at Gibney Dance Center in 2015 to NYC and was celebrated as a “must-see” performance in the 2016 American Realness Festival.

KateWatson-Wallace is a choreographer, director and visual artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She creates experimental performance for the stage, site-based locations, and music videos. Her performance work has been funded by the Map Fund, Doris Duke Foundation through Creative Capital, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, among others. She is a 2007 Pew Fellow in the Arts in choreography. She has choreographed music videos for Animal Collective and Black Dice and created devised performance work with electronic composers Christopher Sean Powell (ManMan), HPrizm (Anti-pop Consortium), and RYAT (Brainfeeder). Watson-Wallace has toured internationally as a performer, choreographer, and guest lecturer and been a guest artist at a variety of universities/venues nationally, most recently at Summerstage Central Park. She has co-curated music and performance events with curator Jaamil Olawale Kosoko and electronic composer/DJ King Britt. She is in the inaugural class of the Low Residency MFA in studio art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.